Blackwall Raises $100M to Put Bot Defense Inside Web Hosting
Blackwall has raised $100 million at a $2.2 billion valuation in a Series C round led by AVP. The round, announced Oct. 20, values the Estonia-based company at four times its 2025 fundraise. Dawn Capital, MMC Ventures and Tera Ventures participated. TechCrunch
The company is led by co-founder and CEO Nikita Rozenberg, with Roi Carthy as executive chairman. Blackwall builds web traffic security tools for hosting providers. That sales channel shapes both how the product is built and how it reaches customers.
Blackwall does not sell directly to website owners. It works with web hosting, managed service and cloud providers, which pass the tools on to their own customers. Like security built into an apartment building rather than fitted to each door, protection sits inside hosting plans small sites already buy, instead of asking them to choose and run separate security software.
The stack is designed for that provider setup. Blackwall delivers it white-label, meaning under the provider's own brand, with API-first provisioning and management built for multi-tenant environments where one system serves many customers. Blackwall
The functions will be familiar to operators. Traffic Analytics shows traffic patterns, visitor behavior and anomalies. Bot Mitigation blocks harmful automated traffic and scraping. L7 DDoS Protection defends against application-layer attacks, which target the software that builds pages rather than just flooding the connection. A Web Application Firewall guards against software flaws, injection attacks and new threats. Content Caching stores copies of assets at the edge, close to visitors, to speed delivery and reduce load on the origin server.
Blackwall says the priority for the new capital is bot traffic, especially AI agents. This is a more specific task than stopping large volumetric DDoS floods. It calls for classification at Layer 7, rules for scraping and automated access, and controls that separate unwanted bots from legitimate crawlers and customer-approved agents without slowing responses or breaking normal visits.
The company plans to use the funding to expand across North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and the Middle East. The plan is geographic growth, not a change in product or sales channel.
The Series C follows a €45 million Series B in March 2025 focused on protecting small and midsize businesses from malicious traffic. TechCrunch
The broader context here is where that security lives. Large enterprises have staff to tune a firewall, manage bot rules and read analytics. Most smaller sites do not. Putting those capabilities inside the hosting platform, pre-integrated and white-labeled, reduces work for the site owner and lets the provider compete on abuse handling, reduced origin load and uptime. The jump to $2.2 billion suggests investors expect automated traffic management to shift from an enterprise add-on to basic infrastructure.
Looking at what this means for providers, the work shifts rather than disappears. API-first setup helps with onboarding, but bot policy, false positives and allow-listing approved agents still need day-to-day attention. White-label hides the vendor, not the operational load. Providers will need telemetry they can act on and safe defaults for less technical tenants.
In my view, the bet is understandable. I have watched each infrastructure wave, from shared hosting to cloud to the current AI crawl, add background traffic that site owners did not request and cannot easily inspect. Tools that make that traffic visible and controllable at the platform level tend to endure. If Blackwall keeps detection accurate as agent behavior diversifies, hosting customers get quieter servers and faster pages without hiring security staff.
